Yes. I was prepared to make snarky comments. I didn't see how it could work.

Then I saw the video. It's impressive, and it works. Somebody put a lot of effort into this design.

Frankly, if you're worried about collisions, I would still just get a helmet. There have to be circumstances where this won't deploy -- or where it will deploy by mistake. And I think the collar looks about as dorky as a good helmet. But this is quite a feat.

As it relies on motion detectors, other than an circuit fault, it'd be hard to get a false release. I'm sure there are some who use their bikes in stunty ways that could trigger it, but for most riders it would seem to work when intended.

I've cracked a helmet once. I was going east on Dayton, just having come out from under the arch and crossing Randall, when a pedestrian stepped into the bike lane in front of the old fire station (but nowhere near the Crosswalk). She didn't even look as she started jaywalking. I did my very best not to level her -- I won't do that again, next time: SPLAT -- and went arse over teakettle over the handlebars as the bike flipped. She was uninjured and hurried away (I still remember seeing her almost running away and just feeling disgusted at her behavior).

My helmet cracked in two. I didn't even have a headache, although my body was wicked sore for a couple days. That was back when my bones weren't brittle from age :)

Mine is surely a very fragile helmet by now - it was new in 1975. Plastic doesn't get stronger with age.

But its thermal properties are unaffected.

The helmet used to have the advantage of being very unusual, which kept cars from pulling out in front of you on the theory that you might be going very fast.

But nowadays everybody has them and so they don't have that effect.

If you happen to hit your head and happen to be wearing one, the fracture of the helmet takes up some energy that otherwise would have rattled your brain; but that doesn't happen a lot.

Mostly you skin your palms and elbows.

I haven't crashed since 1980 or so, at 8000 miles a year.

That was a front tire going flat - and if you have wide tires, the lesson was, stop immediately for flat front tires. The rim steers around inside the loose tire, and that reverses the correction needed for balancing, which means you'll fall over very fast.

Over the course of several years and at several different places of employment, 4 of my coworkers came off their bicycles, hit their head on the ground while not wearing helmets and all sustained brain injuries. They were not improved people when they recovered. One almost died, but he survived, slow witted, his speech slurred, his eyes not tracking very well. These were all relatively low speed crashes - the kind that one might have while riding around a neighborhood. The risk is enormous, so you should use whatever means you can to protect your head.

If a helmet costs 30 or 40 bucks, is your brain not worth that much? I see every rider's individual answer whenever I see a bicyclist. I would not ride even 5 feet on my bicycle without a helmet, and over the years I rode tens of thousands of miles through some of the most beautiful parts of this country. Managed to never hit my head on anything, even while riding some insane downhills, but did skin my elbow once and I landed on my hip once when the bike had a mechanical failure. Other than that - no problems, but I was prepared.

Wear a helmet or don't wear one, just don't expect me to be your attendant when you end up drooling on yourself, wearing a diaper, living in a home like hdhouse.

Florida is one of the states that does mandate helmets for motorcyclists. I'm fine with that, but I'd prefer a guarantee that when a helmetless rider splats his head that he die rather than become a ward of the state in a hospital. Unfortunately, current law does not permit helmetless bikers to waive future medical treatment resulting from their accidents.

"And if we hit our heads hard enough our brains hit the inside of our skulls, which can kill us, and no helmet prevents that"

Au contraire! You see that softer stuff on the inside of the helmet? The exact function of that is to crush when the impact is hard enough, spreading the deceleration over a longer period of time and thus reducing the peak intensity. Yes, of course, you can still receive an impact too hard to survive, but the helmet shifts that point upwards on the energy curve.